Microsoft to Acquire Groove Networks

namalc writes "In a huge shot across the groupware bow, Microsoft announced today that it would acquire Groove Networks, and Ray Ozzie, the founder of Groove, would become Microsoft CTO. Ray Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes, had positioned Groove to straddle both the IBM/Lotus and Microsoft worlds. It will be interesting to see what direction Groove takes now."

This should be a great thing for Groove.

[Sheetrock]

And for Office users in general. Microsoft appears to be taking seriously the concept of the remote office, and seems to be pushing NetMeeting more vigorously -- Groove would fit into this scheme quite nicely, and permit a level of interoperability with other groupware vendors Microsoft has lacked to this point.

Conversely, Groove gets to present its unique approach to a larger audience than ever before, as well as having better access to improve and extend its compatibility with Microsoft products.

It's an exciting time for laptop warriors, that's for sure! Never before has this level of versatility been offered.

MS Press Release

[jmcmurry]

Here's a press release [microsoft.com] from Microsoft with more information and some Q&A with Ozzie and Jeff Raikes, Microsoft group vice president of their Information Worker Business group.

Re:Wow. The God of Notes switches sides.

[Anonymous Coward]

Notes isn't an issue, Microsoft is buying Groove. Ozzie is on record as saying that that the Notes workflow-based architecture is largely obsolete.

Re:Questions

[captwheeler]

1. Who or what is Groove?

   A company name and a product name.

2. What do Groove do?

   Allows web-based group projects with people from different companies. It looks like file sharing integrated with easy web form creation for custom project tools.

3. Why should we care that Microsoft, king of acquisitions, have acquired Yet Another Company?

   MS might make it more popular, or more MS Office centric, or kill a cross platform possibility in the future. (it requires windows)

Re:Guess I can delete it now

[sangreal66]

What, you mean like how Office isn't available on Macs?

P2P File Sharing and Messaging by Invitation,Like:

[Anonymous Coward]

CleverCactus

Re:Mistake:

[grotgrot]

There seems to be an assumption that Groove was a success. Joel gives us a lot of food for thought:

Platforms

www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Platforms.html [joelonsoftware.com]

Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You

www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html [joelonsoftware.com]

Response from Groove

www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000011.html [joelonsoftware.com]

Re:Questions

[stevelaniel]

Has captwheeler actually used Groove? It seems doubtful; it appears that his description of Groove comes from a cursory glance at the website.

Groove is a tool to help groups work together across corporate boundaries. It is not a web tool; it uses a totally separate set of protocols. It uses the Simple Symmetric Transfer Protocol when it's in peer-to-peer mode. It tries to connect directly to remote clients, but if that fails -- because, say, there's a firewall in the middle -- the Groove client can connect to remote "relay servers," which are store-and-forward machines. The remote Groove client sitting behind the firewall then downloads the data from its relay server.

Groove is both a platform and an app. The platform is a set of functions to make other apps "Groovy" -- i.e., so that you can make your app support peer-to-peer groupware functions. The app is a collection of tools -- IM, chat, a notepad, a little drawing tool, file sharing, and so forth -- that use the Groove libraries. I've always viewed the Groove app itself as a proof of concept for the platform; building a community of developers around the platform has always been Groove's goal.

Please don't write any description of the product unless you actually know what it does. And please don't think you know what it does just because you've looked at Groove's website. That sort of uniformed spewage gives Slashdot a bad name.

Microsoft has owned...

[ArmenTanzarian]

30% of the company for some time. Developers from Groove sit in Redmond and developers from Microsoft sit in Beverly Mass. Groove has time and again scooped features Microsoft has envisioned but been unable to rollout in basic OS functionality (just too much to code, inject, test with X set of features, make work on an ancient machine).

I'm a long-time Groove user and have dabbled in component development for a little over a year. Until recently, Groove had a .NET API for injecting tools directly into the platform. They discontinued it recently in favor of a web service interface however.

I think the product could use a bit more maturity, but I think it's got some great potential. Ownership by Microsoft, I believe, will just strengthen their marketshare. Hopefully they won't lose any of their good points.

Re:Questions

[Leth]

Steve also neglected to mention the multiple layers of encryption of the data both on disk and across the wire, as well as an ability to adapt connectivity intelligently based on the current network configuration, allowing it to establish P2P or simulated P2P across firewalls and web proxies, meaning that the IT staff has no real overhead to support the communications, except for the increase in bandwidth.

It also has a complex dynamics engine that allows for total sync between communicators.

Please do try to really find out the answers to the questions before blurting out your assumptions.

Love/hate

[daemoneyes]

People have a love/hate response to Groove. I know I definitely had the hate response. We got Groove at work for a project with an outside consultant, about two years ago. We got brand new PCs at the same time, and my first complaint was that Groove was extremely slow, and not just to work in. It slowed down every PC it was installed on; I think it had a memory footprint of over 200 MB! In any case, it took from one to thirty (!) minutes to launch on my 1.4 GHz/640 MB PC. We had so much trouble with it that a tech from Groove -- an engineer/programmer actually working on the product, I found out later -- to try and sort out the mess caused by starting Groove as a user other than the one that installed it. Problem: Groove by default starts as soon as you log in, I guess so it can check if you have any "instant" messages. I was never able to get satisfactory ansers to questions like: how do I fix a virus-infected file from Groove without deleting it? How do I make backups of files that are stored in a proprietary conatiner on umpty-jillion workstations? How do you manage file permissions without creating additional "spaces" just for restricted files? We were working on this project with a Danish company, and it seems the standard reaction from a Dane to a feature request is "Why would you want to do that?" This was essentially my response to Groove, which is just another stinking heap of buzzword-compliant bloatware that does nothing for anyone except make PHBs think they are helping. They're not.

Re:Questions

[Minna Kirai]

Oh thats not technical enough! comes the reply....

Nope. Your reply wasn't just non-technical, it was WRONG. Calling Groove "web based" is a vile misrepresenation of what it does. That's about as bad as describing the Dodge Viper as a "horse based vehicle" just because you saw the phrase "550 horsepower" on its spec sheet.

It suggests that Groove uses some protocols similar to HTTP or HTML (and thus that it might be interoperable with non-proprietary client software). If a solution is "web based", it implies that I can open up Firefox or at least IE and go connect.

Somtimes people just want a general clue.

Someone who read & believed your message will be worse off than if she knew nothing- at least in that case, she might google around and find the truth on her own.

Re:Questions

[stevelaniel]

No no no no no, a thousand times no. This sort of misrepresentation is what gives peer-to-peer a bad name.

Groove's major contributions are 1) that it encrypts everything both over the wire and on disk, without any user intervention (i.e., it's a UI improvement over PGP), 2) that it handles the firewall problem (see my earlier comment), and 3) that it handles synchronization when users are sometimes online, sometimes offline.

Check out the O'Reilly book on "Disruptive Technologies." There's a section in there on Groove's security model, written by Walt Tuvell and Nimisha Asthagiri, both of whom were Groove security designers at the time.

Get it through your heads: Groove is a tool for small teams spread across companies to work together. It is a set of technologies to enable that.

Attn Bashers...

[Dave21212]

Please, when you are bashing Lotus Notes, if it's the mail client you have issue with, try to state that. Saying you don't like Lotus Notes is like saying you had a bad experience with a car you owned in college, therefor all cars suck !

If you don't like the mail client, use Outlook instead, the servers have IMAP and POP.
If your apps suck, thank a developer (I guess if a VB app you used once sucked, that would mean all computers suck or something?).
Red Box of Death ? Try moving to a version from this MILLENNIUM !

Letsee, I remember distinctly years ago when LoveBug virus hit, everyone was down but the Notes folks... the UI may not be exactly like Microsoft (which is why I think many of you don't like it, it's not Windows:) but the "mail" is robust and secure enough that it doesn't get viruses, you can restore a single user or many (Exchange 2k3 just recently got that I think), and the PKI security is enough that the CIA, FBI, NSA and other TLOs have to use it. Or, if you prefer, you can authenticate using LDAP (even to Active Directory) and even BE the LDAP authentication server for other apps.

Sure, the next argument is that small little 8 person companies don't need the level of security, failover, extensibility, etc. that an enterprise environment requires... That's true, but they don't want Exchange and the overhead it requires either.


A special note to the consultant or whomever in another posting here - *you* haven't converted any shops to Notes lately (and you are The World???) - but the net turnover last year was almost 1500 big shops switching from Microsuck to Lotus (next time research before you slam). Check out the recent case studies [ibm.com] if you like.

For those folks that care, you should know that Lotus Notes isn't email software - email is like 10% of what it does... Lotus is workflow applications, web applications, blogs, middleware and integration, document management, presence awareness (Lotus Sametime IM is #1 in the Fortune 500). And let's not forget, they support open standards more than anyone, period (you would think OSS folks would get this???) If you want you data in XML, you got it... with Microsuck you get their closed version. You can have an app server that runs Domino, attaches to MySQL, output pages using Perl and PHP... anything you want really (simply put, it's incredibly extensible).

Platforms [lotus.com] ? You can run it on Windows, AIX, Solaris, z/OS, iSeries, o yeah, they even have a version FOR LINUX, RedHat and UnitedLinux certified ! (where's Exchange for Linux?).

Check it out for yourself [ibm.com].

Re:Benefits of the Notes creator

[Displaced Cajun]

The UI issues of Notes are shared by most Lotus products -- Lotus' concept of UI is rather different than Microsoft's, and was the one thing I hated most about working for Lotus back when I was on the WordPro dev team back in the late 90s

you obviously haven't used or seen Lotus 6 or 6.5. They have really improved Notes in the last 6 years.

Re:Benefits of the Notes creator

[ralphdaugherty]

However, I am very suprised that he's going to be CTO of MS, he's always been super friendly and encouraging to me even when I was just a peon, it seems like the wrong position for a guy like him. You'd think the MS CTO would need to be a real ballbreaker. I really hope it works out for him.

From articles I read tonight he is just one of three CTO's at Microsoft, one of the other two I heard of, the other one apparently coming from ERP acquisitions.

Ozzie and Gates will be vision makers, not technology ball breakers as far as I can tell. Also Ozzie will remain in the Boston area but spend a lot of time in Redmond on the Senior Advisory Team.
He has already been named by Gates in 1994 as one of a handful of Windows Fellows even though he worked for Lotus.

rd